How to Optimize Your Website Performance

Optimizing the performance of your website today is vital to its success. Although content is obviously very important, today it is no longer the only aspect to consider when creating a successful site. To give an example, if a user finds himself visiting two sites with similar content, but one of the two offers a better user experience, that will surely be the one he will choose to visit more often. As a matter of fact, a platform that offers a poor user experience is likely to be completely discarded by the user, even if it offers quality content and excellent products. Furthermore, the site that offers the best user experience will be rewarded by Google in terms of ranking. In short, no matter what content or products you offer, the more responsive and faster your platform, the better chance it will have to have a better ranking on Google’s SERP. Let’s have a look on how to optimize your website performance in a few steps.

What are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Google Page Experience received a really important update, which has been released in 2021 to introduce new ranking factors, the so-called Core Web Vitals. They represent a really smart tool to measure the website’s performance in order to improve user experience. Core Web Vitals, which can also be called CWVs, are meant to measure three important features which have a wide impact on the way a user interacts with a website. These parameters are speed, reactivity and stability of the site. Google has always evaluated important elements for user experience, such as the size of texts, mobile responsiveness, the presence of non-invasive pop-ups, security protocols and other factors like that. With the introduction of Core Web Vitals, there are now other important elements that have to be optimized in order to offer a smooth user experience and to build a successful site or e-commerce. Here’s the new important parameters not to be underestimated:

• Largest Contentful paint, which is the loading speed of the largest content offered by the site. It can also be called LCP;
• First Input Delay or FID, which measures the time from when a user first interacts with the site;
• Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS, which is the stability of the many elements the user finds in the page.

All these parameters are fundamental for the success of a website and for user experience. As a matter of fact, they have a huge impact on the SEO and heavily affect the ranking in the Google’s result page. If Core Web Vitals are neglected the website could offer a poor user experience and irreparably damage the reputation of the site. This can also have a very negative effect on the relationship the user has with a particular brand.

Why is the page speed so important?

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of how important the loading speed of a website page is. It is in fact a crucial element for the web performance metric that has to be optimized. The loading speed also affects the conversion rate which is a key factor in order to turn web visitors into paying customers for your business. As a matter of fact, the website conversion occurs when a user smoothly performs the desired action on the website in the shortest possible time.

You can be sure that if your website is fast and load the pages right away, the user will be encouraged to subscribe to newsletters, download your content and, most importantly, to come back to your site. As a matter of fact, the faster are your site’s pages, the higher conversion rate it will have. Visibility and usability are other key factors for a good user experience. The latter doesn’t only include the speed loading of the pages, but also the responsiveness to all user requests. In order to be successful, your website has to quickly load all content, images and any other elements. All this must obviously also be applied to the mobile version of your site, which is often the most visited by the average user. In practical terms, in the great competition for visibility and ranking, the website that will grant a smooth user experience, great interaction and responsiveness, stability and fast loading pages will always be chosen over a slow website.